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Article Excerpt
Introduction
DR. NELS ANDERSON (1889-1986) WAS among American sociologists a pioneer whose work is only now beginning to win the recognition it deserves, especially in Europe. His ethnographic studies of wandering workmen (The Hobo), frontier sectarians (The Desert Saints), and migrant laborers (Men on the Move) are seen as models of empirical research that provide insights into the lives of groups and classes marginalized by the wider society.
Anderson's life experience was as varied as his work. A child just as the frontier was ending, he knew first-hand life in the slum, the backwoods, and the Indian reserve, as well as work in mining, logging, and road-gang communities. Before he began his formal education in sociology at the University of Chicago, Anderson had been a newsboy, mule-skinner, mine worker, track repairman, coal forker, field hand, railroad maintenance carpenter, timberman, grade school teacher, concrete former, millwright, Army engineer and demolitions expert, itinerant peddler, and male nurse. After he received his Masters degree in 1925 from the University of Chicago he found work as a Juvenile Protection Agency investigator, a night club inspector, Municipal Lodging House employee, college teacher, and freelance writer (and ghostwriter). Having received a Doctoral degree in 1930 from New York University, Anderson entered government service as head of Labour Relations in the Work Relief Program, and when the war broke out he became an officer for the War Shipping Administration overseas. After the war his duties included service with the High Commission in Frankfurt and the State Department in Bonn. He helped reorganize free trade unions in Germany and ran a research centre for graduate students to study the needs of refugee families and of youth throughout the country, the nature of work and community organization in a coal-mining district, and the state of housing in Frankfurt. Upon retiring from government service in 1953, Anderson was appointed Director of Research for the Social Science Research Institute established by UNESCO, Cologne. At the end of his UNESCO assignment in 1962, Anderson went on a lecture tour in Sweden, Australia, and India. Two years later he at last returned to his first vocation, university teaching: he accepted an invitation by Memorial University of Newfoundland to serve as Visiting Professor and Head of the Department of Anthropology and Sociology, where he remained until, in 1966, he was invited to become Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of New Brunswick (UNB), where he offered a heavy load of courses until his retirement in 1977. Named Emeritus Professor of Sociology by the university in 1979, he continued to maintain an active scholarly life until a few weeks before his death on 8 October 1986 in Fredericton, New Brunswick.
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Not long after Nels Anderson assumed his teaching duties at UNB, he and I became friends. During his post-retirement years, as Anderson continued to work on his publications and invited lectures, I became his editor-typist. My long acquaintance with Dr. Anderson led the Department of Sociology to ask me to give a talk on his life and work at the twenty-fifth Qualitative Analysis Conference, "The Chicago School & Beyond," held at the University of New Brunswick in May 21 to 24, 2008. What follows is the public lecture I presented.
I WON'T HAVE MUCH to say about Nels Anderson's accomplishments as a sociologist. They are impressive, especially in light of the fact that for most of his long life he held no university position, and was pretty much forgotten or unknown by academics in his chosen discipline. Instead, I will talk about the man I came to know during his twenty years at UNB. We spent a lot of time together, on and off the job. In the course of our growing friendship, Anderson came to confide in me in an off-hand, storyteller's manner, in which he revealed many details of his life and his feelings long hidden from his kith and kin. Little did I imagine when first we met in 1965 that he would leave a legacy, in the form of the Nels Anderson Research Fund, that promises to alleviate the burdens of generations of students in sociology. But rare would be the recipient of an Anderson scholarship who would have any idea who his benefactor really was. I hope to shed a little light on Nels Anderson, a man who made an unlikely journey from wandering workman to itinerant scholar.
Appearances to the contrary, Nels Anderson was a complicated man. He was easy to get to know but hard to fathom. He rarely spoke of his innermost feelings, of his hopes or disappointments. Even in his autobiography there is little to be found that tells us what kind of man he was. Yet, all were there, under the surface, to be revealed only to those he trusted enough to take into his confidence. His letters and conversations reveal the Anderson hardly anyone knew.
Like many individuals who feel ill at ease in the company of those who appear more sophisticated than themselves or in greater command of the situation, Anderson shunned encounters that made him feel awkward. He avoided talking shop with fellow students at the University of Chicago, distanced himself from professors, and rarely took on the burden of making conversation. Long after he had served as head of labor relations in the work relief program, Anderson still remembered how he was slighted by "intellectuals" of the WPA (Work Projects Administration), one of whom, he said, would "look down on me." Confessing that, "I looked kind of seedy," Anderson also noted that he "didn't know how to carry on a conversation." (1) Early on Anderson learned that instead of making conversation he could simply monopolize talk by launching into a monologue, a strategy that works best with a small audience. His monologues, spontaneously delivered in my office next to his, provide the basis for much of what I am about to say about Nels Anderson.
Here was a man who was proud, gentle, and sometimes caustic; frugal and generous; unpretentious, yet sensitive to slights and criticisms; reticent, but at the same time bold in his thinking; funny, witty, and often ribald: he told me that he could always remember the "dirty" jokes he'd heard, but never the "clean" ones. Most were fooled by his manner and appearance, thinking him unobservant, not particularly "with it." Arthur J. Viditch once said to me, at a reception following the presentation of an award to Anderson by the American Sociological Association at Boston, that Nels was a deceptive man: he appeared to be modest, but he was really a born ham.-" Shortly after he had given an honorary address at St. Francis Xavier University, Anderson told me that he enjoyed giving a public lecture. He loved an audience: not only did his evening address exceed the time allotted by more than an hour, but in the question period that followed Anderson told many stories to a delighted audience. By 10:30 the chairman of the Department of Sociology finally closed the question period. Was Anderson by then ready to call it a day? Hardly, for he went on to attend the reception afterwards, where he continued to entertain his hosts with stories and witticisms drawn from his generous accumulation of experience. It was almost midnight before he finally retired, after an eighteen-hour day. He was then 92 years old. It was a good day.
His last invited address before a university audience almost proved to be his undoing. He had been asked by a Dean of Engineering to speak to a student audience on his chosen subject, "The Social Implications of Engineering." (3) On 10 September 1981, Anderson found himself before the largest audience he had ever faced, some 2,000 students in engineering, technology, and industrial education, crammed into Brigham Young University's (BYU) big lecture theatre. Once the lengthy introductions were over, Anderson rose to speak in the little time remaining. He walked unsteadily to the lectern, which he then gripped tightly, and rocked to and fro as he began to speak. There were two small microphones affixed to the lectern, one on each side. They might have appeared as gleaming metallic snake-heads on stalks of flexible tubing, swaying just out of his peripheral vision as he moved his head left and right while speaking. He began to push aside the right-hand mike, which bobbed back again, and each time he warded off the offending mike there was a booming crackle of the huge auditorium speakers, drowning out his faltering words. When Anderson was not fighting off the right-hand mike he kept up a steady tapping with his signet ring upon the left-hand mike, producing a sharp rat-a-tat-tat that echoed throughout the room. At first, his audience bore it stoically, with a little shuffling of feet.
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Fully aware beforehand that he could not possibly get through his forty-six page paper in less than an hour, Anderson had decided to type notes of his lecture on small green slips of paper. Armed with his bundle of notes, he hoped to deliver his lecture in spite of poor eyesight. He soon realized, however, that this was not possible. A recent operation had reduced his visual capacities, and Anderson found he couldn't read his notes. He confessed to his audience that he could not see his prepared notes and thus would have to speak without them. This he proceeded to do, first by talking about his boyhood in Chicago and Provo, and then by describing his experiences in the trenches of World War I. He got a big laugh when he admitted that he and his buddy had won the war.
From then on his audience was with him, listening attentively. From my vantage point at the end of a short row of chairs to Anderson's right I could see unfolding what the audience could not: a little drama that at once reminded me of the priceless scene near the end of Chaplin's Limelight, in which Chaplin plays "Calvero," a manic violinist whose leg keeps disappearing up his capacious trouser as he frantically saws away on his violin before a concert audience. The audience's attention is fixed on Calvero's vain struggle to retrieve his unruly leg. Meanwhile, his accompanist, a near-sighted pianist played by Buster Keaton, is having troubles of his own: his sheet music keeps slipping down onto...
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